TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – US uranium producer and project developer Uranium Energy Corp (UEC) on Wednesday announced that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had issued two final Class I disposal well permits for the Burke Hollow in situ recovery (ISR) project, in South Texas.
The NYSE MKT-listed company reported that the mine permit, aquifer exemption and radioactive material licence applications were in advanced stages of technical review and would be followed by the first production area authorisation application at Burke Hollow.
Receiving these permits, in addition to the already approved disposal well permits, would allow operations to start at this project, which was one of the company's largest ISR projects.
UEC started exploration drilling on the Burke Hollow project in 2012 and discovered three mineralised trends later that same year. Then the project was expanded to its current size of more than 8 000 ha.
To date, the company had discovered uranium mineralisation in three separate mineralised horizons, with two distinct and separate trend areas of the property, resulting in an inferred mineral resource of 5.12-million pounds of uranium, grading 0.09%.
The mineral resource estimate was based on 75 000 m of drilling in 526 holes since mid-2012.
Only about half of the project, about 72 km from the company's Hobson processing plant, had been explored to date.
UEC would start a drilling programme in tandem with permitting activities to delineate projected extensions of previously discovered mineralised trends, which continued for another four miles to the south and west of the two trend areas containing inferred resources defined within its current compliant technical report.
The company hoped to report on new drill results in the fourth quarter.